


Rumors of the Truth but I’ve Kept Them Quiet

by FrenchTwistResistance



Category: Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (TV 2018)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-05
Updated: 2019-10-26
Packaged: 2020-10-10 10:36:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,196
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20526620
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FrenchTwistResistance/pseuds/FrenchTwistResistance
Summary: Hilda’s first year at the Academy.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> September group chat prompt: Academy.

Zelda’s already established herself.

To her credit, it hadn’t taken her long. 

Most everyone had known her already and those who hadn’t had figured out soon enough. She hadn’t had to expend any extra energy, just the regular energy of presenting herself the way she preferred to be seen. Just the regular energy of neutralizing enemies. So regular as to almost be boring. Passé even. No real competition, very little challenge, and therefore almost no entertainment.

Zelda’s used to being the one who is the one. More than center of attention. More like eye of a hurricane. She expects it, and she is comfortable in it. There are only certain people in certain circumstances who might usurp her role as queen bitch. And she likes to think she has control over those people. However popular and attractive these people might become or be, respectively, she knows their weaknesses and can manipulate situations to her advantage. Because she is she. And she’s had a lot of practice. Again, not even much of a competition. It’s nice to coast, ride her own wave.

By the time Hilda appears on a warm September morning, eyes alert and shining, fingers white-knuckled on the handles of her kitschy matching luggage, Zelda’s very palpably the alpha at the Academy, although she is not physically present at Hilda’s intake.

Hilda’s shown to a sparse double room on the second floor. Her apathetic guide tosses a map and class schedule onto the twin cot that will be Hilda’s and tells her flatly that freshman year is always rough, tells her to expect harrowing.

Hilda’s known as much for ages. But she unpacks quickly, stores her luggage under her bed. She fluffs her hair and pinches her cheeks in the dirty fourth-hand mirror and then proceeds to the common room for orientation.

Hilda’s at the back, and she’s searching for her sister. Surely Zelda has a leadership role—if only because she likes to be in charge; surely Zelda is here somewhere, telling people what to do and reveling in the attention of so many new awestruck eyes. But either her own eyes deceive her, or Zelda has opted out of this particular ritual.

As Hilda listens to this speaker about accelerated coursework and that speaker about extracurricular clubs, she realizes her sister wouldn’t be caught dead in this kind of ceremony. Perhaps if it had been held in the basement and everyone was whispering conspiratorially about fraternal orders and orgies...

Hilda, for all her wholesome studiousness, is bored. She’s already enrolled in accelerated coursework and knows she’ll be able to find whatever extracurricular club she’s interested in organically. This is all dry, redundant information disseminated by nerds, second-tier popular at best. She can respect them and empathize with them. In another context she might be one of them. But as much as their interests might overlap, she knows she can’t compromise her sister’s station by associating too closely.

She slips out the nearest exit, navigates the industrial kitchen, is finally outside in the cool, crunchy early autumn. The moon is only half full, but its illumination is enough to find Zelda standing under a pecan tree smoking a contraband cigarette.

“Zelds?” Hilda says tentatively.

“What?” Zelda says.

“Nothing. Just making sure it’s really you.”

Zelda laughs.

“Who else would it be?”

“I’m sure there’s plenty of you shirking your responsibilities—”

Zelda laughs again. Hilda pulls her cardigan closer around her at a rush of chill wind.

“You’re assuming a lot,” Zelda says. “And anyway, shouldn’t you be in your orientation meeting?”

Zelda’s draped against the trunk of the pecan tree. She’s wearing jodhpurs and riding boots, a flowing white cotton blouse with several buttons undone at the collar. Her leather riding gloves are tucked into the front of her belt, and her hair is in a messy plait. Hilda analyzes the outfit and responds accordingly:

“What, exactly, are those staid bozos going to orient me to? How to be laughed at at a mixed-sex dance?”

Zelda stamps out her cigarette with the toe of her highly polished boot, looks Hilda up and down. She’s craved a challenge, but she’s not sure she likes that her sister is reading her so well and likely shaping up to be the most worthy contender. She’s had her whole life to tacitly compare herself to Hilda—the much-loved and indulged baby of the family. Sure, Zelda’s always been the pretty one, but Hilda’s always been the adorable one. There’s a nuance there that’s easily seen in a family, but among strangers that line will be murky. They’re both objectively very attractive physically and psychologically. Where Zelda dominates and manipulates, Hilda infiltrates and sublimates. 

Zelda is torn between making Hilda an ally or admitting she’s an adversary. She decides on neutral for now:

“Change into your riding clothes. The equestrian club hardly bothers with a head count. You can get a good layout of the grounds.”

“A physical orientation,” Hilda says. Zelda’s eyes flicker, and she lights another cigarette, says,

“Hmm, yes. If you insist on being that way.”

Hilda doesn’t precisely or strictly know what way she’s allegedly being, but she suspects. 

Hilda changes into her riding clothes regardless.

xxx

It’s been a few months.

Hilda’s in the library. She’s often in the library. She’s studying divination. Her roommate is there at her table. Regular. They study together often.

But also at her table there is a handsome third year who’s just now taking the class. And also a gorgeous senior who’s already passed divination at least two years ago but is somehow sitting at the table anyway, intermittently reading and touching the collar of her blouse, flitting her eyes toward Hilda’s straight-spined but examining form.

Her brow furrows, her tongue sticks out, but she was raised by a very proper mother who insisted on good posture always. Especially when she’s immersed in something; it ought to be second nature, and it is.

Hilda focuses on what she’s focused on. And when she’s focused she’s particularly beautiful. 

No one is sat at her table who doesn’t think so.

Zelda walks into the library. Zelda is no stranger to studying. But she’s also no stranger to not studying. 

She’d had an orgy lined up for the evening, but that had fallen through, so she’d decided to trawl the library for willing participants. And that’s when she’d caught sight of her sister’s table—one feeble lamp and several books open, Hilda the only one studying text, all the others studying Hilda.

Zelda seethes.

Sure she hadn’t even tried. But Hilda has tried even less. Hilda seems to not even notice her pull and power. Zelda feels an electric zip along her spine at the competition even as she feels the low thump of her heart as she recognizes Hilda’s magnetism.

Zelda approaches. It may be unspoken rivalry or curiosity or—Satan forbid—attraction.

“You’re late for the equestrian club meeting,” Zelda says.

Hilda dog-ears a page in her divination book, looks up. Zelda is not in her riding clothes. Zelda is in her underclothes and a fur-lined robe poorly concealing them, ready for an orgy that wasn’t meant to be.

All the others at Hilda’s table pretend not to notice. But Hilda doesn’t dare pretend. Hilda says,

“How stupid of me to have double-booked.” Hilda slides her pen between pages, closes a tome around it.

“But—” Hilda’s roommate says. Hilda cuts her eyes toward her, and the roommate shuts up.

Hilda has several reservations, but she knows if she indulges any of them she won’t ever come close to her sister. She won’t be close physically and she won’t be close intellectually. And although she doesn’t care too much about social standing, she knows that too will be compromised if she doesn’t follow her now.

Hilda’s soon in a saddle.

xxx

Hilda’s almost asleep.

It’s the last quarter of her first year at the Academy.

Her brain flits between potions and trigonometry and making out with pretty boys at fraternity parties.

She’s almost asleep—that dreamy state of bizarre images a tick away from a fall that leads either to lucidity or a dreamscape.

Hilda starts awake.

And Zelda’s on top of her.

Zelda looks flabbergasted. Zelda’s surprised and elated and trying not to be either.

Hilda wants her to be both even as she knows this isn’t how she’d fallen into bed. Even as she knows this isn’t how Zelda had fallen into her own bed a storey and several rooms away.

Hilda knows teleporting is a thing witches do. Hilda knows accidental teleporting is a thing witches do less often but do do sometimes, if there is some undeniable impetus, some urge so strong and innate it cancels out any rational thought. Hilda blinks, takes in her surroundings. Yes. This is her room. She hasn’t accidentally teleported herself. So that means...

“Zelds?” Hilda whispers.

“Hmm?” Zelda says. Zelda doesn’t fidget or adjust. Her weight is just there on top of her, as if she belongs, as if she owns.

“Did you mean to—” Hilda starts. Zelda’s eyes narrow, and Hilda can perceive that even in the dark.

“What could you do if I didn’t mean to?” Zelda hisses.

“You know I’d let you,” Hilda says. Zelda’s fingers are biting into her hips. Hilda winces at the pain, and Zelda scoffs,

“Like I care.”

xxx

Hilda’s harrowing starts the next day.

Zelda hasn’t had to expend much energy to be seen and revered.

It’s a comfortable amount of energy to retain her position.

It’s a lot more energy to not be known.

A competition against herself is the most equally matched competition. It’s often unsatisfying, but at least it’s fair.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> October prompt: kinky hazing at the Academy

Hilda’s heard of harrowing. Everyone has. It’s supposed to be frightening and. Well. Harrowing.

The old, literal definition of raking, tilling, breaking up clods in already roughly plowed earth comes to mind. Beneficial in its way in order to homogenize and smooth. Make a plot of land easy to sow in.

There’s a sense of making ready to it. A sense of soft pliability upon the completion.

But that’s the philosopher in her justifying petty juvenile actions.

The part of her that is not a philosopher had always thought of it as a painful and embarrassing experience, but that attitude is based upon the stories she’s heard from family and friends. Harrowing is awful by all accounts although Zelda and Edward had never spoken of it, so she had figured it was something that happened to other people. She is not as esteemed as Edward or as beautiful as Zelda, but she still figures her Spellman status protects her.

She is wrong, of course.

It’s the last quarter of her first year at the Academy. She’d thought if harrowing were to occur it would’ve already happened. 

She is wrong, of course.

Hilda’s just fallen asleep after a particularly grueling trigonometry exam and a celebratory jaunt at one of the fraternities. She’d had a vivid, almost palpable, dream of Zelda on top of her. Bizarre and erotic and scary.

But now the sun is peeking over the horizon, and she must be alert for the day. She is. But there’s a fog about her that she can’t shake. That realistic dream. She could swear her hips are bruised from Zelda’s fingernails. No marks, but a weird feeling all day.

She’s walking across campus to her hexing class—a late class, almost sundown—when she’s arrested.

It’s a supernatural pull that stills her limbs, makes her stop on the sidewalk.

“The woods,” a husky, unreal voice says to her, and she can move again, but she can move only toward the woods. She’s never once missed a class. She figures her professors like her enough that by now that she can skip with impunity, especially considering she’s being supernaturally coerced.

She walks now with no agency, pulled by some force.

And she finds herself standing in the shade of a maple tree.

“Now starts your harrowing,” a far-away voice says.

Hilda looks around. It’s all the expected foliage. Nothing unusual, nothing untoward.

“Not so harrowing, then,” Hilda says to herself. But that far-away voice is back, saying,

“On your knees.” Hilda laughs, says,

“Excuse me, what?”

A chill breeze and then a supernatural force. A loud smack, and Hilda feels it on her backside. She drops to her knees in pain. Another smack that echoes through the trees. More pain, and Hilda is bracing herself with her hands in the soft earth.

“Well?” Hilda says. “Is this what you want?”

She’s talking to the air, talking to nothing, talking to talk so she knows she still can.

The wind whips through branches above her, and there is another sharp pain. Hilda grunts, says,

“Just as I thought. A coward. I’m here on my knees, and you’re hiding.”

Another slash at Hilda’s backside, and Hilda thrusts her hips unconsciously, groans, eeks out,

“Pathetic.”

Hilda’s speaking stronger than she feels.

So this is harrowing. So this is distressing and tortuous. So this is what will dissolve her lumps of clay and leave her as malleable as is necessary. Necessary for what? Malleable to whom?

Her palms take more weight, sink in.

And then there’s a presence behind her. It’s heavy and dark and warm.

And suddenly. Hilda’s hands are bound. She looks at them in front of her in wonder, as if these wrists with invisible ropes twined around them are someone else’s.

“Pathetic? You might reconsider…” It’s a voice that is everywhere and nowhere and very familiar.

Hilda’s hands are bound. 

Hilda’s feet are bound, too.

And that familiar voice,

“Do you think me pathetic now?”

Hilda’s eyes are tightly closed now, so she can focus on how she’d gotten into this predicament, can focus on identifying the voice.

“Zelds?” Hilda says after several silent beats. “If you wanted me trussed up like a Yule goose, you could’ve just asked.”

A gag is shoved hastily into her mouth, and there is shuffling and whispering, all very near and very regular sounds of young-adult mean girls tittering together. The supernatural haze has lifted and revealed this as the mundane hazing it is. Hilda sighs into the handkerchief between her teeth. The philosopher in her had wanted, expected more. But she’s not a philosopher at heart, and this situation is not worthy of philosophy anyway. It’s the same old power play and peer pressure. It’s the same old pissing on the fence.

She realizes with some alarm that she’s the fence.

She should be angrier about it all. But she isn’t. People do whatever they have to to gain dominance, social standing. She’s in her first year, so she’s at the bottom of the ladder. It’s as inevitable as it is unpalatable.

Perhaps Edward and Zelda hadn’t talked about harrowing not because they hadn’t experienced it but because it had been a humbling thing. Both of their personalities comprised of mostly pride. Whereas Hilda had very little pride. She could humble herself to anyone in the right circumstance. She can accept authority even if she doesn’t like it.

Hilda’s trussed up like a Yule goose, and finally all those voices she has been discerning coalesce into the one piercing presence, one piercing presence that is Zelda’s voice:

“You’re the one on your hands and knees.” 

Hilda is able to spit out the handkerchief.

“Just how you like me,” Hilda finds herself saying. It hadn’t been a conscious thought and nothing she would say in normal circumstances, but it comes out regardless.

Again a tittering. Hilda imagines Zelda’s being reprimanded by other alpha girls. Until.

Sharp pain. 

It’s a thin branch from the maple tree, cutting across her upper thighs swiftly, firmly. She hisses. Mother had always made them choose their own switches.

“I don’t like you at all, in fact,” Zelda says as she executes another very precise switching.

Hilda’s hips rise in spite of herself.

“Don’t quite believe you on that one,” Hilda says.

A long silence, and then Hilda’s invisible but very real bindings at wrists and ankles tighten. She’s less a trussed goose and more a stuck pig. Either way on offer. Either way it’s harrowing.

Hilda’s bound. Her ears aren’t, though.

“So luscious—”

“Don’t know why you haven’t—”

“I’d’ve fucked her—”

And Zelda’s voice:

“Oh shut your filthy mouths, or I’ll gag you, too.”

“Well, you certainly tried, love. But it didn’t take, now did it?” Hilda says. There’s some laughing and then suddenly there’s something else in her mouth. It takes her a second to place. But she’s not blindfolded, and she finally figures out that what she’s staring at is a smooth pale forearm and what’s in her mouth are two fingers. She considers biting them, but she reminds herself that she is bound at wrists and ankles and quite vulnerable.

“You have a few options here, Hildegard,” Zelda says, scraping a fingernail gently against the roof of her mouth. “You can keep talking, and your harrowing will extend with every word you utter, or you can be a good girl and take it and be in your own bed by sunrise.” She removes her fingers, and drags the tip of one over Hilda’s bottom lip and then down to her chin, pushes that chin upward. They look at each other. “Well?” Zelda says. Hilda weighs her options—the ones Zelda has elucidated and the ones she has running through her own brain. She decides on the submissive,

“Whatever you deem appropriate.”

“I like the naked at the scary tree thing with the ghostly voices!” someone says, but Zelda hastily shushes her.

“Prosaic, traditional, and boring,” Zelda says to the girl she’s shushed. And then she turns back to Hilda, crouches down in front of her. “But you’ve got an imagination. Maybe you could use that little party trick of yours and give me a few ideas.”

Even now, even here, even in this position, even with Zelda poised to do unspeakable things to her in the name of initiating her into the Academy’s ranks, Hilda has no real inclination to embarrass her sister beyond repair. She can already feel so much rolling off her—jealousy, pride, fear, desire—and if she’s given a formal invitation and free reign to mingle their thoughts and feelings, she knows she’ll find things Zelda doesn’t want her to find, things Zelda herself doesn’t want to confront. She whispers,

“I don’t think you want me to look at your psyche just now.” 

Zelda’s eyes flit to the women behind Hilda and then back.

“You’re right. But I want to look at yours,” Zelda whispers.

Hilda closes her eyes against the memory of their playing doctor as children. “You show me yours, I’ll show you mine.” Innocent and curious.

Zelda says full voice, a show for her friends,

“What wicked little thoughts live under that lustrous hair?” Zelda winces slightly. Hilda knows she hadn’t meant to compliment her, had meant only to demean her but had accidentally revealed some buried affection. The others snicker, and Zelda’s eyes are boring into Hilda’s.

“I don’t know what a harrowing entails, specifically.” Zelda’s eyes are still on hers. “But I have plenty of wicked thoughts for you to work from,” Hilda says. She hasn’t opened her mind to Zelda, but she knows Zelda knows she’s saying this as a concession, as accommodation. She knows because Zelda has stood up and is looking down at her with a deadly mix of ire and consternation and lust.

Zelda straightens her spine, says officiously,

“She’s not worth my time. Do whatever you want with her.”

There is shuffling and rustling and murmuring.

And then Hilda is nude at the tree with the ghostly voices.

She’s not as frightened as she might be. It’s harrowing, but it’s the expected harrowing. She can deal with this, process this, understand this. The philosopher in her knows this is a mere manifestation of her deepest fears and desires, and that’s the way harrowing should be. The id and ego and superego battling it out on a field of their own making. 

She’s been here for hours, listening to herself fight herself, weapons all intimate and precisely aimed at all her insecurities. She shivers in the cold of the night and the cold of her introspection. 

And then Zelda’s voice,

“I counted on them to be this tedious and uninspired.”

Hilda’s heard more details about this harrowing tactic than a lot of the others. The scary tree with ghostly voices you desperately want to hear is traditional. So she doesn’t turn. She fixes her gaze on a tree root that’s half-exposed and looks a little like a deer’s hind leg. 

But there is a creeping feeling on her scalp, first a tickle, then firmer and firmer until it’s a pull, and she’s being dragged. She could’ve sworn that she’d heard the tree produced voices only, not sensations. But here she is, supine in the leaves and sticks and soft earth. Warmth above her, soft and sharp at once.

“I couldn’t let them hurt you, and I couldn’t let you freeze to death. But I also couldn’t let myself—” Zelda sighs and silences herself by kissing Hilda. Dry lips to dry lips, a confession that isn’t.

The warmth above Hilda is hot now, and she remembers that vivid dream. Maybe it hadn’t been a dream. Maybe this is a dream. Maybe, maybe, and a tongue slips in her mouth, and she’s not sure she cares whether it’s a maybe.

She tries to ground herself, clutches her hands into the warm mass above her, feels her fingers press into ribs and buttocks, hears an accompanying hiss, feels an accompanying buck.

The warm mass above her is real, able to be felt. Not a product of the tree and its auditory hallucinations.

Hilda’s stuttering hot breath against Zelda’s cheek,

“Is this my harrowing, then?”

“Maybe it’s mine,” Zelda says.

Maybe, maybe, and a cool hand is at Hilda’s breast, and she’s not sure she cares whether it’s a maybe. Hilda’s nipple pebbles and juts into Zelda’s hand, and Zelda’s fingers are pulling at it, rolling it. A lightning rod to her center.

“You could’ve done anything you wanted—” Hilda pants.

“But then everyone would’ve known what I wanted,” Zelda says.

Hilda lets out a long breath. It’s why she hadn’t wanted to use her empathic abilities, but hearing it from Zelda, straight out—

Zelda’s other hand is on her lower abdomen. Pressure and then nails scraping and then, just before those nails meet wetness they still, and Zelda breathes into Hilda’s ear,

“You do know what I want, don’t you?”

“I don’t,” Hilda says. It’s half a lie. “But I’d like to.” And that’s the whole truth.

It’s a new moon. A dark night, shadows upon shadows and stars upon stars in the clear black sky. Hilda’s breathing hard and fast beneath Zelda, and Zelda’s breathing hard and fast above Hilda.

It’s a silent, dark, heavy-breathing moment as Zelda’s hand hovers above Hilda’s pubic bone. And then Hilda says,

“I don’t think you wanted to gag me with a handkerchief or your fingers.”

“Oh what do you know!” Zelda says, as she plunges into Hilda’s wet heat.

Hilda cries out, and Zelda swallows it, kisses her, tongue almost to uvula.

Zelda’s thigh and knee reinforcing her wrist, harder, faster, farther. Zelda’s tongue sliding against molars and tongue and hard palate. 

And Zelda transitions seamlessly. In the space of a breath, she’s shallowly penetrating Hilda as she circles her clit aggressively and bites down on her trapezius.

Hilda is steel. Her iron and carbon have been melted down together and fused and she has come away stronger for it. If she survives any other orgasms, especially those bestowed upon her by Zelda, she will become an unbreakable alloy.

She hardly remembers her own name, let alone what inane questions she’d previously asked Zelda, and she stiffens first and collapses after.

She lies there, trembling and overheated. 

And she might not remember the question, but she remembers the sentiment, remembers the desire that had been dripping from Zelda’s subconscious.

Hilda opens her eyes. Zelda’s propped on an elbow next to her and staring at her. She’s smug and self-satisfied to a degree. But there’s a restlessness and edginess there, too.

Hilda maintains eye contact as she slinks up and pushes at Zelda’s shoulders.

“I know what you really wanted to gag me with, what you really wanted to put in my mouth,” Hilda says. Hilda’s right hand is at Zelda’s breastbone, pushing and pushing. Once Zelda is flat on her back, Hilda descends.

It’s cold and windy. But Hilda doesn’t care about the gust and gale as her mouth finds molten sweet.

Maybe, maybe.

She licks a long, dusky path. Burnt sugar and metal. Quick. Slow. Medium. Quick again. Explosion.

And Zelda’s a stiff board, yelling into the night.

Zelda’s straightening her clothes soon after: 

“If anybody asks—”

“No one will,” Hilda says as she repositions herself facing the scary ghost tree. “It’s harrowing, after all.”

Zelda stalks away.

There’s a philosopher in her, and that philosopher is confused.


End file.
